Mr. Speaker, I was very glad to be part of the NDP's changes to Bill C-2, the accountability act, to ensure that appointments are made in a fair, open and transparent manner, that all appointments are based on merit and that patronage will now be against the law.
Of course there was the committee that interviewed Mr. Gwyn Morgan to head up the appointments commission. Mr. Morgan, the Prime Minister's choice, had called the Kyoto accord “sound-bite junk science”. He was of course against the Kyoto accord. For reasons of his extreme partisanship and also because we felt it would be unsuitable for someone who was heading up the continent's largest gas company to oversee appointments such as those to the national energy board, we found him unsuitable.
At the time, the Prime Minister said that he was going to do away with the appointments commission and he needed to have a majority government to have fairness in appointments, but really, all it took was NDP amendments to make the appointments commission work.
My question is for the hon. member who has just spoken. Will he take a different tack from the Prime Minister, who said he was going to take his bat and ball and go home, and urge his party now to deal seriously with the appointments commission and finally set up compliance with this fair and transparent process that the NDP has helped bring into place?